First he set the police on his own people, now ‘democratic’ Prime Minister Erdogan is refusing even to meet them. The peace talks he promised are being held not with protestors themselves but with a group of official mediators the protestors have never met.
In the days to come, Erdogan will try to persuade the world that he is battling extremists, but as Claire Berlinski points out in her heart-breaking piece in this week’s magazine — written from the centre of the riots in Istanbul last night — the demonstrators were until recently very ordinary citizens from all walks of life, brought together in peaceful protest. She describes the scene before the police arrived:
‘It was glorious — a huge innocent carnival, filled with improbable (I would have hitherto thought impossible) scenes of nationalist Turks mingling amiably with nationalist Kurds, the latter dancing to some strange ghastly species of techno-Halay, the former pumping their fists in the air and chanting their eternal allegiance to something very nationalist, I’m sure.
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